International Journal of Biomedical Imaging 
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 12819, 11 pages
doi:10.1155/IJBI/2006/12819

Controlled Cardiac Computed Tomography

Erwei Bai,1 Chenglin Wang,2 Ying Liu,2 and Ge Wang1

 1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Radiology, University of Iowa, Iowa City 52242, IA, USA
2Controlled Cardiac CT, LLC, Iowa City 52246, IA, USA
Received 3 December 2005; Accepted 5 March 2006

Recommended by Yibin Zheng

Abstract

Cardiac computed tomography (CT) has been a hot topic for years because of the clinical importance of cardiac diseases and the rapid evolution of CT systems. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for controlled cardiac CT that may effectively reduce image artifacts due to cardiac and respiratory motions. Our approach is radically different from existing ones and is based on controlling the X-ray source rotation velocity and powering status in reference to the cardiac motion. We theoretically show that by such a control-based intervention the data acquisition process can be optimized for cardiac CT in the cases of periodic and quasiperiodic cardiac motions. Specifically, we formulate the corresponding coordination/control schemes for either exact or approximate matches between the ideal and actual source positions, and report representative simulation results that support our analytic findings.